Eric Cantor Cancels UPenn Speech Because of All-Protester Audience

Yesterday, the House Majority Leader was slated to give a speech on income inequality — more on that later — at the Ivy League school’s well-respected Wharton business school, but canceled after being informed that the first 300 people to arrive would be admitted and there was a good chance they would all be Occupy Philadelphia protesters. Despite Cantor’s no-show, about 500 demonstrators gathered anyway, some breaking into the building’s lobby through an Au Bon Pain. They shouted some well-rehearsed slogans, including “We are the 99 percent,” along with a few more tailored ones, such as “Eric Cantor, come out, come out wherever you are,” reported the Daily Pennsylvanian, UPenn’s student newspaper. Yet ten minutes after Cantor’s speech was scheduled to have started, the protesters had alreadydisbanded.

The Daily Pennsylvanian did, however, acquire a copy of the speech Cantor was preparing to give on the nation’s worsening income gap, which started off by riffing on the metaphor of a “ladder of success,” even acknowledging that many are unable to reach the ladder’s bottom-mostrungs.

He answered: “That child needs a hand up to help climb the ladder.” More money for schools so she can get a good education, perhaps? Or a jobs package so that girl’s mother or father can adequately support her? Cantor’s got something a little more free-market in mind, what he calls the “Steve JobsPlan.”

So we’re supposed to rely on the kindness of, basically, the rich to solve the problems of the poor. Sounds an awful lot like trickle-down economics, swathed in Apple’s sleek brushedaluminum.